Originally a comment by Freemage on On thin ice.

To an extent, the whole Trans Debate has come down to which set of adjectives the nouns “man” and “woman” should be tied to–GCFs hold that those terms apply to “Male” and “Female”, while TRAs insist that they apply to “Masculine” and “Feminine”.

The TRA position falls apart once you give it a hard look under this light, because it’s trivially easy to point out that the latter adjectives have spongy, shifting definitions, and as categories have often had traits that swapped from one side to the other. Computer programming used to be a feminine occupation, for instance, because it was unglamorous and relatively low-paid. Once it became more rewarding, men invaded and it became a masculine domain.

(Actually, the battle’s a three-way. TRAs want to slave sex to gender (if you want to wear dresses, you’re a woman), Socio-Religious Conservatives want to slave gender to sex (if you’re a woman, you should wear dresses), and GCFs want sex to be a distinct category and ‘gender’ to be burned to the ground (wear a dress if you want to, it doesn’t make you a woman).

The Scotsman reports:

Ms Cherry, who will return to Arnot Manderson Advocates, said that as she no longer had front bench duties for the SNP in Westminster, she would take on “human rights and public law cases from time to time as my duties as a constituency MP allow”.

…

“I am grateful to the dean of Faculty for granting me a dean’s dispensation to reflect the fact that my availability to be instructed will necessarily be limited by the requirement to be at Westminster regularly and to fulfil my duties to my constituents,” she said.

…

Ms Cherry added: “I remain very committed to the law as an important instrument for upholding human rights and preventing discrimination and I am sure that there will be a synergy between the cases I take on and the values I have championed in elected politics, particularly respect for human rights, equality and the rule of law.”

The MP has been at the forefront of a bitter row within the SNP about the impact on women’s rights on proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act.

She had been the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for home affairs and justice, but was removed from her role in February after a week of intense internal strife within the SNP on the divisive issue of a conflict between women’s rights and the extension of rights for trans people.

A battle with many fronts.

The revelation that she was returning to the bar came as a group of women protested outside the Scottish Parliament during First Minister’s Questions.

Dressed in costumes of the female characters in Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale, the women said they were “protesting against Nicola Sturgeon’s policy program” which the claimed is “detrimental to the rights and safety of women and girls.”

They accused the Scottish Government of creating a “hostile environment” for women who do not support GRA changes.

La lutte continue.

Giuliani’s lawless behavior is catching up with him.

Rudy Giuliani was suspended from law practice in New York state on Thursday, after a state appeals court found he had lied in arguing that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from his client, former U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Appellate Division in Manhattan said there was “uncontroverted” evidence that Giuliani “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public” in connection with Trump’s effort to overturn the election’s result.

“These false statements were made to improperly bolster (Giuliani’s) narrative that due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen from his client,” the court said. “We conclude that respondent’s conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law.”

The interim suspension takes effect immediately, pending further proceedings before an attorney grievance committee.

Let’s hope it converts to permanent.

Throwdown!

This is going to be BRILLIANT.

Oh for godsake.

“Let’s get four male people to discuss the rights and wrongs of letting male people intrude on women’s sports. Obviously let’s not get any women to do that because who cares what they think?”

Women, eh? Always wanting to be consulted when their rights are being given away. So self-centered.

In another part of the forest…

Defamatory?

The Gender Critical Research Network is an explicitly anti-intellectual attack on Gender Studies, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people, and inclusive, intersectional feminist politics.

Including the word “explicitly” was…reckless.

Proponents of the “gender critical” perspective, including the Members and Affiliated Members of the Network, are adamantly and openly opposed to recognising trans people’s rightful and valid claims to their gender and their rights.

Again – “and their rights” – reckless.

Their efforts to undermine trans rights are particularly concerning now, at a time when trans, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people in the UK and elsewhere are already experiencing such immense restrictions on their social, medical, interpersonal, and political livelihoods.

Yes I’d call that defamatory. I’m not a lawyer BUT.

As numerous scholars and activists have documented, those espousing gender critical perspectives routinely make transphobic, discriminatory, inaccurate, and harmful claims about trans people specifically, and gender more broadly, that have profoundly negative effects on social and political life. Their unfounded viewpoints are inimical to intersectional feminisms and scholarly debate, and they contribute to the ongoing “anti-gender” attacks on the field. In refusing the concept of gender, and in framing “sex” as immutable, binary, and essentialist, the gender critical perspective runs counter to decades of scholarship from across the social sciences, humanities, and medical fields, and it relies on and invests in racist, colonial understandings of sex/gender.  

Stupid. Maybe defamatory too, but what jumps out at you is the stupid.

A school board meeting in Loudoun County Virginia got so rowdy that the cops had to break it up.

Many of the speakers were there to express support or opposition for a draft school policy that would require teachers to address transgender students by their names and pronouns, as well as grant transgender students access to facilities and activities that match their gender identity. Loudoun is pursuing the policy in accordance with a recently passed state law requiring school systems to revise their treatment of transgender students.

Well, the trouble with that is, by “revising” their treatment of transgender students that way they will be mistreating other students, especially the female ones. If boys who claim to be trans girls can use the girls’ toilets and changing rooms, that’s an intrusion on the girls’ rights.

Late in the evening, after the school board finished its work, chair Sheridan gave a short speech, saying she could not let the “disruption that occurred in our board room tonight go unaddressed.”

…

Sheridan noted that June is LGBTQ Pride Month. She promised that the Loudoun school board will continue to protect the rights of LGBTQ students. She said efforts to convert the county to “a political battleground” — rather than a place of learning — will ultimately fail.

There again – what about the L? what about the rights of L students? They may not want to be forced to pretend that boys who identify as lesbians really are lesbians.

Just talking about LGBTQ as if they all had the same needs and rights and wants isn’t going to work any more.

David Paisley had to intervene.

There was no hate speech.

Meanwhile of course DeWahls is getting the real thing.

The Guardian does its passive-aggressive thing:

The Royal Academy of Arts has apologised to an artist whose work was removed from its gift shop after it branded her views transphobic on social media, calling its initial decision a “betrayal” of its commitment to freedom of speech.

That’s an absolute car crash of a lede. The RA has apologised to an artist whose work was removed from its gift shop? What do they mean? Removed how, by whom, when? Did art thieves take it? Was there a smash and grab in the middle of the night? Did an employee of the gift shop take it home? Who removed the artist’s work?

The artist’s work was removed from its gift shop after it branded her views transphobic? The gift shop branded her views? Who cares what the gift shop thinks? And what is the connection between the removal and the branding? “After” tells us nothing except the chronology.

Her work was removed from its gift shop after it branded her views transphobic on social media? What was the gift shop doing branding her views on social media?

It’s absolutely crap writing and reporting, all in the passive voice with the actual agents rendered undetectable. Who did what?!

And this creepy evasive disappearance of agents and mention of anonymous “its” that could be the RA or the gift shop or a gang of thieves just underlines how cowardly and dishonest the Guardian is on this subject. As Orwell probably said a thousand times, writing this bad just screams of evasion.

Jess de Wahls, an embroidery artist based in London, became the focal point of the row after the Royal Academy decided to no longer stock her work after a 2019 blogpost – in which she outlined her views on gender identity politics – was deemed transphobic.

There it is again – that “was deemed.” That’s how they reported it in the beginning, and they must be pleased with the results, because there it is again. DEEMED BY WHOM?

And they hide the agency of the 8 people who “complained” to the RA while they somehow transfer the agency to Jess DeWahls. She “became the focal point of the row” – the hussy.

In a statement, the Royal Academy said it had mishandled the situation and that its internal communications had failed, which led to De Wahls hearing about the work being pulled via social media.

Yet another stupid badly-written evasive sentence.

They then quote from the statement and what DeWahls told them in response, and let us know that the culture secretary approves. Then –

De Wahls’s comments from 2019 are what led to accusations of transphobia, which the artist denied.

No her comments didn’t “lead to” the accusations. Some fanatics made the decision to punish her for her comments.

When the post was flagged, De Wahls’s embroidery work was removed from the Royal Academy gift shop, with the artist saying she was contacted by officials at organisation who told her they were investigating.

Who removed her work? Don’t just tell us it “was removed,” as if by magic invisible hands; spell it out.

And what gets the last word? In fact the two final paragraphs? None other than Peter Tatchell all over again – a reappearance of his response to the Guardian from a previous article. Why?? Why give the last word to Peter Tatchell? He’s not trans, and he’s a man, so his rights are not at stake in the way women’s rights are. Why give him the last word?

Courtesy of What a Maroon here is the actual “apology”:

Media Statement from the Royal Academy of Arts

There has been a great deal of debate around the RA’s recent communication about no longer stocking the work of Jess de Wahls in the Royal Academy shop. We have thought long and hard since then about this and the wider issues it raises.

One thing is clear to us now – we should have handled this better. We have apologised to Jess de Wahls for the way we have treated her and do so again publicly now. We had no right to judge her views on our social media. This betrayed our most important core value – the protection of free speech.

There was also a failure of communications internally which resulted in Jess de Wahls first hearing via social media that we would no longer stock her product in the RA shop. We will now reopen discussions with her regarding the restocking of her work.

Plurality of voices, tolerance and free thinking are at the core of what we stand for and seek to protect. These events raise some fundamental issues. Freedom of expression can open up debate, create empathy or respect for difference, it can also at times cause hurt and outrage. This has confirmed to us our commitment to freedom of expression and to addressing complex issues through engagement and debate.

We will continue to reflect on this and to look at our internal processes to ensure we learn from it. We want to make sure we navigate this better in future.

For further press information, please contact: press.office@royalacademy.org.uk

The struggle continues.

The Royal Academy’s oh so generous tweet:

Guess who is all up in there talking about both sides and rushing to pick one again.

Putting out a rude clipped sulky “Here’s a link to our fucking apology” is not apologizing.

I wonder if there’s chaos in the corridors of The Guardian. The Enlightened won’t be liking Tanya Aldred’s piece on fairness in sport.

Without a separate category for females, there would be no women in Olympic finals. Even in the 100m, one of the events with the smallest performance gap, approximately 10,000 men worldwide have personal bests faster than the current Olympic female champion, Elaine Thompson-Herah (10.70sec). And it’s not just track and field. While the smallest attainment gap between the sexes comes in running, rowing and swimming events (11-13%), this moves up to 16%-22% in track cycling, and between 29% and 34% when it comes to bowling cricket balls and weightlifting. The difference in punch power between men and women is a whopping 162%. Not, then, to be sniffed at.

But the IOC sniffed at it, ruling that tweaking testosterone levels is all that’s required.

Increasingly, however, research is showing that these testosterone guidelines do not guarantee the “fair competition” the IOC was hoping for. Ross Tucker, a sports scientist and expert on testosterone advantage in sport, succinctly sums it up: “Lowering of testosterone is almost completely ineffective in taking away the biological differences between males and females.” There is just no proof that reducing testosterone takes away the advantage of muscle mass, strength, lean body mass, muscle size or bone density. Despite this new evidence from Drs Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg, the IOC has put off any further decisions making until after Tokyo and left it up to individual sports federations to decide their own transgender policies.

Because, let’s never forget, it’s only women who are harmed by this. Naturally that’s just not very important.

Some claim that this debate is irrelevant as trans women aren’t winning everything, which is true. The simple explanation is that the athletes who have transitioned haven’t generally been good enough. As Tucker says, the best female cyclist will beat 99% of men, but the best men are 10-15% better. And anyway, regardless of whether trans women win or not – whether Hubbard wins or not – it is legitimate to question the rules that allow them in the competition, given the retained advantage. Given the safety issues in combat, collision and some team sports. Given the hidden exclusions, those women and girls who decide that a sport now isn’t for them. And the not so hidden ones: Kuinini “Nini” Manumua, the 21-year-old Tongan who would have gone to her first Olympics if Hubbard hadn’t been selected.

The American cyclist Veronica Ivy (previously known as Rachel McKinnon) says hang the heartache, trans women are women and should simply be able to self-identify themselves into the women’s category at every level.

He’s Canadian actually, and he’s also a smug bully who enjoys looming over the women he just finished cheating.

Literally just one.

Graham Linehan on the Laurel Intrusion:

Representatives of the nation of Samoa have been speaking out against Hubbard’s participation in the women’s category since 2019, when Hubbard bested local hero Feagaiga Stowers at the Pacific Games. Stowers, a young woman who began lifting to cope with surviving sexual abuse, had won a gold medal in the 2018 Commonwealth Games. That year, Hubbard had been ineligible for participation after sustaining an elbow injury. However, upon returning to the sport in 2019, he placed first; Stowers took the silver medal, and Charisma Amoe-Tarrant of Australia took the bronze.

In a 2019 article for Samoa Observer, Mata’afa Keni Lesa wrote of how Stowers had previously entered the Samoa Victims Support Group, where she began weightlifting, pointing out that her story and success had been inspirational in her home country. According to Lesa: “It will be a tragedy of gigantic proportion for sport when this sort of carrying [on?] is allowed. We talk a lot about empowering women, this does not empower women. If anything, it is taking power away from them. It is robbing them of what rightfully belongs to them.”

We don’t talk so much about empowering women any more. In the context of prostitution and pole dancing maybe, but in general, nah. Men are the new women and we’d rather talk about them.

Samoa’s Prime Minister, Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, also objected to Hubbard’s participation. In 2019, he told Samoa Observer: “This fa’afafine or man should have never been allowed by the Pacific Games Council president to lift with the women. No matter how we look at it, he’s a man, and it’s shocking this was allowed in the first place.”

But if you just think of him as 1. a woman and 2. the most oppressed kind of woman of all, then all the shock goes away.

Women are not a hormone level, as Save Women’s Sports representative Beth Stelzer points out. Though we have known for untold centuries that men possess a physical advantage over women in sports, the admittance of males into female sports is basically an ongoing experiment being conducted at the expense of women and girls in order to boost the confidence of such men while simultaneously discouraging and insulting female athletes. Truly, men’s feelings are being valued over women’s reality. To compound the matter further, women’s weightlifting has only been an Olympic sport since 2000, for a total of five Olympic games. In contrast, the men’s weightlifting category debuted in 1896.

Five games is enough for anyone. Well ok not anyone, but for women. Women don’t matter that much, so five games is plenty.

In addition to biological advantages, Hubbard was born into wealth: his father, Dick Hubbard, is a politician and businessman who made a fortune as a cereal magnate. Hubbard was involved in a car accident that seriously injured an elderly couple, requiring hospitalization and spinal surgery. The couple, Gary and Sue Wells, spoke out in 2019 spoke out against what they believed was a lenient penalty given to Hubbard, and at the suppression of Hubbard’s name regarding their case: “The penalty and suppression were totally unjust. No notice was taken of our feelings and she (Hubbard) got everything she wanted.” Hubbard was discharged without a conviction, ordered to pay $13,000, and had his license restricted for one month. Hubbard’s name was suppressed from the media to allow him avoid stress while training for the Olympics, to which Gary Wells responded: “It was to protect her from hardship while she trained for the Olympics. What a load of crap. We couldn’t do anything for four months.”

Ok so he’s rich and male and white but just never mind that, he’s trans and that makes him The Most Vulnerable.

Several men have already begun competing against women, many of whom previously competed against men, and some of whom have apparently ‘aged out’ of the male category. Valentina Petrillo, for instance, aged 44, has already won 3 gold medals at the women’s Italian Paralympics Athletics Championships — despite Petrillo having made not even the minimum effort to falsify his official documents. He is still listed as a male on his identification.

But he calls himself Valentina. End of discussion.

For centuries men have been portrayed as the default humans, which has resulted in medicine being researched on predominantly male test subjects, among scores of other examples — so many, in fact, that Caroline Criado-Perez wrote an entire book, Invisible Women, on the subject. Because of this androcentric cultural lens, that which men desire is framed as a human right, whereas women’s rights can be sidelined to make room for men’s feelings.

Women are born to be sidelined. That’s just how it is.

Abigail Shrier on Gorski et al v Hall, via Bari Weiss:

Within a day, Dr. Hall’s article was flooded with nearly 1,000 comments, mostly, she says, from activists demanding the article be stripped from the site, but also from some readers expressing their appreciation. Angry emails from activists swamped the blog’s editors. Within two days, those editors had given Dr. Hall an ultimatum: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer. 

This is a colleague, remember, not a subordinate. It’s an itchy feeling when colleagues start giving you ultimatums (or ultimata if you prefer). The temptation to say “You’re not the boss of me” becomes very strong.

“What surprised me was that my fellow editors attacked me, too. Basically what they said was that my article was not up to my usual standards as far as medicine, science and critical thinking went. And I didn’t feel that I did anything but what I always do. That surprised me,” she told me. Considering the editors’ ultimatum, she elected to have the editors who disagreed add a disclaimer to the website. “I told them I did not want it retracted. And the next thing I knew, they had retracted it.”

So the ultimatum actually was: retract, rewrite, or allow them to add a disclaimer, and if you choose the last then we’ll retract it anyway.

It’s not only corporations facing this type of activist pressure. Public libraries now do, too.

Halifax Pride, the annual LGBTQ festival, announced late last month that it would cut ties with the city’s library system over its insistence on carrying Irreversible Damage, calling it “transphobic,” and claiming that it “jeopardizes the safety of trans youth” and “debates the existence of trans people.” 

I wonder if it ever occurs to them that over the long haul this kind of coercion isn’t going to make their ideology more convincing but rather the opposite. “If they have to force it on us maybe it’s kind of a feeble set of ideas?”

There are more people who already think that than we’re allowed to know. Shrier hears from them.

Child and adult psychologists and psychiatrists write to say they have witnessed a surge in transgender identification among teen girls who seem to be acting under peer and social media influence. Teachers write to say they believe that the phenomenon is plainly an example of social contagion within their classrooms. Surgeons and pediatricians and endocrinologists write to wonder aloud at what has happened to their profession.

There are lawyers who posit that lawsuits are on the way — brought by others, presumably. Professors who have come to hate their jobs — you can’t discuss your own research without trampling on a young generation’s vast neural network of sensitivities. Journalists at our most storied newspapers, TV networks, and literary magazines, even at NPR, write to tell me they liked my book, they agree with it, and to tut-tut the abuse directed at me. They assure me that the horrible accusations — from child predation to white supremacy and transphobia — accusations that will forever live on the internet, blackening my name, are things no one really believes. They wish — wish! — they could say so publicly.

This is fine. Teenagers are ruining their futures, and people can’t say anything about it publicly, because the venomous pressure to shut up is so powerful.

For more than a year Shrier thanked people who wrote to her this way.

But then, a few months ago, a pediatrician reached out to say that she also thought it was insane that minors were self-prescribing testosterone and that she agreed that her profession was negligent in unquestioningly “affirming” the sudden trans-identification of teenagers. 

The standard response didn’t cut it this time. I wrote back as politely as I could: That’s just not good enough. You are a doctor. We aren’t the same with regard to medical scandals. I can continue to seek and publish the truth. I can interview experts and report what they’ve said. But you can appeal to your own authority. You took a Hippocratic oath. If you see young patients in harm’s way, you have an obligation to do something.

The same is true for other professions. If you are a teacher, you entered the profession in order to expand young minds. If you are watching them being warped, it’s your responsibility to fight that. If you are a journalist witnessing lies being spread by your colleagues, it’s your responsibility to stand up for truth. If you are a professor, watching your colleagues being bullied — a med school professor watching hokum being peddled as fact, a scientist watching the corruption of research — there’s no one else to speak up but you. 

And if enough people do it will swiftly become far less dangerous to join them.

Jerry Coyne on the sleazy behavior of the bros at Science-Based Medicine:

… the site removed a book review written by another respected physician, Harriet Hall, known for being one of the Air Forces’s first women flight surgeons as well as a notable advocate for science based medicine and a vociferous debunker of quackery.  And—get this—Hall is one of the journal’s five editors.

If only she’d been three of the five.

Neither Shrier nor her reviewer Hall [is a] transphobes, but now they are irrevocably typed as that. The ACLU staff attorney for transgender issues, Chase Strangio, has called for the banning of Shrier’s book from bookstores (odd for the ACLU, no?), and an uproar has arisen—all because Shrier is urging caution about a social phenomenon whose sudden increase demands scrutiny and investigation. To even deny the need for instant affirmation of a wish to be a boy if you’re a girl is to label yourself someone dedicated to eliminating transsexual rights or even advocating the genocide of transsexuals. That is hogwash, of course, and Shrier’s book and Hall’s careful review implicitly show that. She was instantly labeled a transphobe for not damning the book, and Science-Based Medicine got hundreds of outraged comments (see below).

Why is the denial of the need for instant affirmation equated to “transphobia”? Because the ideology, the movement, the activism, are all about how awesome it is to be trans and how dazzlingly fabulous trans people are.

And why is that? I don’t really know. Maybe because in reality it’s rather grim? Stripped of all the hoopla and celebration you’re left with people who have at the very least made their romantic and sex lives quite difficult. I suppose the more trans people there are the less difficult their sex lives are…or are they? Because the activism, after all, is all about insisting that trans X are X, so they don’t want to limit their dating pool just to other trans people, do they. That would imply that trans X are not X. It’s quite a trap they’ve caught themselves in.

But at least the more trans people there are the more trans friends are available, and maybe that’s reason enough.

The reason Hall’s review was archived is because Science-Based Medicine retracted it—a review by one of its own editors! (I don’t expect Hall will be an editor much longer.)

I expect the same thing. I found I couldn’t stand FTB any longer, and I expect Hall will find likewise.

Jess DeWahls talks to Spiked:

It turned out that an embroiderer was ranting online about the fact that I had work in the Royal Academy. She had attacked me twice before. This time, she basically encouraged her followers to contact all the places that stock my work, including the Royal Academy, and tell them that they shouldn’t work with a transphobe. That afternoon, the Academy emailed me, saying that it had received eight complaints about ‘transphobic’ views I had voiced online.

In other words one opportunistic rivalrous shit (whose work is crap) told people to go after DeWahls and the RA took this coordinated campaign seriously.

Transphobic views like ‘women have vaginas’ and ‘there are two sexes’, presumably. It said it would have to investigate. I replied saying that I was not transphobic and that eight people is hardly representative of the general public. I heard nothing back until the Academy posted on its Instragram story to say that it had dropped me.

Bad manners on top of credulity and incompetence and scorn for women.

At first, I just felt horrible. When you voice views like I do, you get a lot of private support, but people don’t feel they can support you in public.

Unless they’ve already been there themselves, and not only can’t be canceled a second time, but also have better friends and allies.

That changed on Thursday morning, when I woke up to an inbox full of emails from journalists who wanted to speak to me. I spoke to The Times that day, and then the Academy was suddenly really keen to talk to me. An incredibly flustered woman rang me, but didn’t know what to say or do other than tell me that the Academy was just going to sit and let people express themselves, because there are obviously strong opinions on both sides.

As if this were just normal. As if the RA always did what 8 complainers told them to do.

After I wrote my blog, organisations that I was collaborating with immediately dropped me. I helped to raise funds for companies like the Vagina Museum and Bloody Good Period. They dropped me straight away, disassociating themselves with me publicly. I knew my blog would cause a stir. But the reaction was much more horrible than anything I could have anticipated. There isn’t anything comparable in real life to being hounded online and having strangers sending emails saying that they hope you kill yourself.

Ultimately, though, she doesn’t give a fuck.

People like JK Rowling are not cancellable, and that makes the people who hate them so angry. In a way, I’m not cancellable either, because I don’t give a fuck. What the fuck are they going to do? They keep putting rocks in my way and I’m making a fucking statue out of them. I don’t care. I’m not going to have arseholes make my life miserable just because they are miserable.

Living well is the best revenge.

Sarah Ditum on the different standards for your Gaugin and Picasso on the one hand and your Jess DeWahls on the other:

And what had De Wahls actually done to make herself untouchable? In 2019, she published a long, considered essay laying out her thoughts on gender identity. “My hope is that this will help you, the reader, the viewer, to understand my conclusions about this subject,” she wrote. “And I will tell you them candidly so no mistake can be made in misunderstanding or misrepresenting me.” As anyone who has ever ventured an opinion on gender could tell you, this was always a vain hope given the torrents of bad faith that run through this subject.

…So it didn’t matter how precise De Wahls was when she wrote: “I have no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex (or in whatever way they please for that matter).” It didn’t matter that she described her own close and supportive relationship with her father, who lives a gloriously gender-nonconforming life in heels and lipstick. It didn’t matter that De Wahls, who was a child in pre-unification East Germany, drew parallels between the chilling propriety of gender-identity dogma and the constant self-censorship demanded by life under the stasi.

What mattered was that she had said no, and no amount of thoughtfulness or articulacy can make female refusal inoffensive. “I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such,” De Wahls stated, and in doing so she asserted both an internal and an external boundary: a boundary that said she would not automatically treat male people as though they were female, and a boundary that said she would not think of male people as though they were female.

Not permitted. Some people are allowed to have boundaries, and others are not. Some people are allowed to ignore boundaries, and others are not.

“The RA is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion and does not knowingly support artists who act in conflict with these values,” it said in a statement. Although you can still buy a book about child-rape enthusiast Gauguin and prolific mistress-abuser Picasso.

Or maybe “equality, diversity and inclusion” simply aren’t on offer for a Tahitian teenager who ends up at the wrong end of an artist’s syphilitic penis. There’s an argument which used to be made (and thankfully isn’t so much anymore) than an artist’s special role in society sets him (always a him, in this argument) beyond the norms of bourgeois decency: if it cost Picasso “the blood of those who loved him” (in the words of his granddaughter Marina) to produce that tasteful cubist nude so you can hang a print of it in your living room, then so be it.

Because the people harmed by Gaugin and Picasso were only women. Women don’t matter. That, not coincidentally, is why trans women matter and women don’t. Women’s place on the Mattering Map is nowhere at all.

But then, De Wahls is a woman, and historically the RA has always found decency a useful weapon for excluding women: it deemed women too delicate to take part in life drawing classes except as models, and so denied them a complete artistic education, which in turn justified keeping them out of any significant role in running the Academy.

Now it’s “inclusion” that does it.

I’ve realized I have more to say on Peter Tatchell’s fatuous remarks to the Guardian on the definite rightness of the Royal Academy’s libel of Jess DeWahls:

Veteran LGBT rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said: “Trans women are different from other women, but being a different kind of woman is perfectly valid and no justification for the denial of their identity.

Let’s think about this. How are trans women “different from other women?” They’re different in being men. That’s a very differenty kind of difference. You could replace it with the word “not.” Trans women are different from other women in being not women. Well yes, that’s different all right, and it’s also a negation, and an opposite. Not-man is not an exhaustive definition of woman, but it’s certainly a crucial one. Women and men are the two human sexes, and there are no others.

So, yes, actually, being a “different kind of woman” in the sense of not being a woman at all, in the sense of being a man, is not “perfectly valid” in the sense of being the thing you in fact are not. That whole claim is simply perverse. It’s like saying “the fact that a potato is not a blueberry is no justification for denying their identity.”

How did we get to the point that grown-ass adults are talking this kind of gibberish?

And then what does “perfectly valid” mean? Nothing. It’s just a club to whack you upside the head with if you try to resist.

And then what does he mean “the denial of their identity”? The identity is not theirs. That’s the whole point. If I say I’m the pope, that doesn’t establish the “validity” of my “identity” as the pope, for the crude but compelling reason that I’m not the pope.

Gibberish. It’s all such gibberish.

“If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”

What on earth does it mean to “deny Jewish, black or gay people’s identity”? That’s not a thing. Nobody does that. The problem is the opposite of that – it’s saying the identity is spoiled, is bad, is something to belittle or demonize.

And one more thing. Of course Tatchell says “If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity” but doesn’t say “women’s identity.” Well he couldn’t, could he, because that’s exactly what he’s doing.

Ash Sarkar thinks it’s all just fine.

Nobody says it’s “en masse.” So what? Any is too much. “It’s just one guy cheating” is not a powerful argument.

Again: not the issue. Women shouldn’t be made to give up any of their opportunities to men.

Fair and square? A man in a women’s competition? What’s fair or square about that?